Archive for Trends

On June 16, 2015, InWorldz began offering a new land purchase option. Known as a “2×2“, for $10 more per month than a regular 45000-prim private region, InWorldz now offers the option of owning four 12000-prim full regions. This offers slightly more prims in total (48000 prims) for a corresponding increase in cost, but with four times the virtual land space.

To be very clear, these are four full normal regions. The only difference from previous offerings is that they are billed as a single unit at $85/month, must be present together on the map in a 2×2 square layout, and each region is limited to 12000 prims. One other less obvious difference is that they are guaranteed to be hosted on the same server machine, making all communications between them faster, for even smoother crossings than the already smooth InWorldz crossings.

A Very Popular Option

It now seems this 2×2 offering has proven to be very popular. After less than two weeks of availability, the total region count in InWorldz has risen from 1257 regions (June 16) to 1467 regions(as I write this late in the late hours of June 28). That represents an increase of 210 regions, oran increase of 16.7% more regions in less than two weeks!

In addition to offering this as four new regions, InWorldz also offers to migrate existing regions to a new “2×2”, if the requirements for a 2×2 is met:

Each existing region must have no more than 12000 prims.

Any existing (and new) regions must (and will) be owned by a single user.

The regions must be in a 2×2 square layout on the map, and meet the usual requirements for new regions in terms of permission to expand from any neighbor regions with which the new regions come in contact.

A Winning Combination

The reliability and performance of InWorldz, its Phlox script engine, solid SL-compatible vehicle and controls implementations, secure permissions and reliable inventory and asset storage has made InWorldz a popular location for communities with large builds, from vehicle racing to large roleplay environments. This new option for the “2×2” four-pack of regions at an affordable price appears to provide a winning combination for many creators requiring more virtual land space, as well as the hobbyist builders who just want to build in a more limitless environment.

There has been quite a bit of doom and gloom regarding yesterday’s decision by the United States Court of Appeals in Verizon v. FCC, however I feel there are two significant aspects of that ruling that have actually ensured a future of net neutrality. Yes, on the surface it sucketh greatly, but the more I think about the ruling, the more I believe it could hardly have gone any better for the FCC. It is pretty much the worst possible scenario for Verizon and the other Internet providers, other than a total loss on every aspect.

There are two very critical positive aspects to the ruling:

disclosure

authority

Any losses to net neutrality are either short-lived due to the second aspect, and significantly weakened by the first.

Disclosure

Yesterday the court ruled in favor of the FCC when it comes to providers being required to disclose any non-neutral traffic management activities:

The ruling did, however, preserve the FCC’s current power to require Verizon and other broadband obligations to disclose their activities — in other words, to reveal how they are managing traffic: “Verizon does argue that the disclosure rules are not severable, insisting that if the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules fall so too must the disclosure requirements. We disagree […] we are satisfied that the Commission would have adopted the disclosure rules absent the rules we now vacate, which, we agree, operate independently.” (see the full gigaom.com article)

This is actually very bad news for Internet providers in that it means those with complaints against providers may no longer have to figure out, and prove, what the providers are doing. And if the providers do more than they disclose and that is discovered (and eventually would be), then they would be found in violation of this ruling. And the second point above makes that situation very interesting.

Authority

Yesterday’s ruling also made it clear that the FCC does have the authority to regulate broadband (as well as its understood authority over carriers):

The biggest piece of good news is this: On the issue the case was supposedly about, the one with the greatest long-term significance, the FCC won. Verizon’s core argument was that the FCC doesn’t have legal authority to regulate broadband. The court’s answer was unequivocal: It does. The FCC made a sufficiently strong case, the judges said, that it could do so to promote investment in advanced communications services under Section 706 of the Communications Act. And, they continued, the FCC was sufficiently convincing that net neutrality served that goal. (see the full theatlantic.com article)

This is both critical to the long-term, as the technology changes, but also in combination with the disclosure ruling above, it means that the FCC has the authority to act when violations of the disclosure occur.

The “Net” Result

Overall, I believe this leaves Internet providers are placed in a very awkward position: they may now be able to favor their own websites and media sources over third-party ones, but they will have to reveal that they are doing that. And again for what may be their larger goal, they can now charge extra for fast, reliable service, but they have to reveal that. And the FCC still has authority over these Internet providers, and retains authority over future Internet services.

The first provider to announce different levels of service, or preferential website treatment, will likely suffer a significant PR backlash, and customers (and the FCC) may be silently thinking “Go ahead, punk. Make my day.”

Verizon’s official statement after the ruling may have been worded to try to deal with the potentially huge negative public relations reaction:

Verizon has been and remains committed to the open Internet which provides consumers with competitive choices and unblocked access to lawful websites and content when, where, and how they want. This will not change in light of the court’s decision.

Verizon seems to be saying that the court has ruled that the FCC cannot block opponents of net neutrality, however Verizon will voluntarily comply. But a skeptic’s view of the statement would highlight the key word “unblocked access”, which is very different from “neutral delivery of”, including performance differences.

Because of that wording, I remain one of those skeptics. I will accept the good news in the ruling, but we must all ensure that the disclosure aspect of the ruling becomes the primary tool in the fight to preserve net neutrality.

Comments Off on Some Overlooked *Good* News on FCC Net Neutrality Ruling

Over on Inara Pey’s blog posting on region crossings by vehicles, Pussycat Catnip added a comment that asked the question:

Are there really Open Sims that -lack- this ability? I’d just assumed this was as standard as the ability to rez-in your own avatar… (ie: logging in).

I started to post a reply there, but after seeing the length, I did not want to hijack that blog posting in any way. So here is my answer here:

No, to the best of my knowledge, all OpenSim grids have lacked this ability until now, unless you include InWorldz. It’s a very significant thing, and was in also a big accomplishment by Linden Lab when they provided this for MONO scripts in Second Life. But it’s not really anything to do with physics, or vehicles. It’s about transitioning a running script (in anything) from one region to another. The explanation is a bit long; my apologies.

The Script Continuation Problem

When SL went with the .NET/MONO runtime environment, they forego the ability to control scripts very closely, since the runtime environment was developed by a third party. But during a region hand-off, they need complete control. They need to be able to stop scripts running in one virtual runtime, transmit them to another region, and load them in an object on that region, and not restart the scripts, but rather continue them from where they left off. So it’s just not a matter of re-rezzing a new copy of the same thing on another region; it must restore a copy of that object with the scripts running in the same context as they were when the object hit the region border. All the active data, the current state of the script’s execution contents, must be restore and continued from where it left off. For example, before this, in OpenSim, scripts were restarted (from their beginning, losing their current context) after a TP or region crossing. InWorldz achieved this continuation of scripts with the introduction of the Phlox script engine last summer, but it was not possible in OpenSim until now.

Linden Lab’s Solution

When Linden Lab implemented this before any of the alternative grids, there was no ability to get this execution context from the third-party runtime environment (MONO). So Linden Lab developers effectively had to become MONO developers, and provide significant hacks, er, I mean extensions, to the MONO project. Which then effectively meant they were running their own variant of MONO. (I’m not aware of how extensive or localized the changes were from the standard tree.) It was a lot of hard work, but they eventually provided the hooks in MONO that they needed to pause running code (MONO scripts compile to native code), and to serialize the data into a stream that could them be fed to the next region, deserialized, and reapplied to a copy of the object on the other region. That was a lot of work and I’m sure when they started, they probably weren’t really sure to what degree their success would be.

InWorldz’ Solution

When InWorldz chose to attack this problem about a year ago, they chose a completely different path. They chose to create their own Phlox Script Engine runtime environment as a virtual machine, providing whatever hooks were needed as an inherent part of the design of that virtual machine. Then compile LSL (or any language desired) into the intermediate p-code that their own virtual machine understood. Not only does this keep control of the runtime environment for scripts within the InWorldz development project, but it allows much easier extensions in the future, much MUCH better processor consumption and memory management, and complete control of scripts.

One of the planned side-effects of this Phlox design is direct control of hand-offs between regions. These can be done *so* efficiently that some naysayers actually complain that videos of crossings (here and here) must have been doctored, or faked in some way. It’s that good. Vehicles are just one example of script crossings. Physics really doesn’t play into this much. If you can walk across regions, you’ve performed complex crossings of physical objects. The tricky part is having the scripts continue where they left off, uninterrupted, and this includes vehicle scripts (and a lot more).

Avination and OpenSim Milestone

This is why I give credit to Avination for their recent success in the major work item of script state persistence across region crossings. The vehicle part of it isn’t really the big deal here. Having true continuation of active scripts on the other side is a Big Deal. This is also a key part of why I found the “first” claim by Avination to be so outrageous; InWorldz has had vehicle crossings since the Phlox runtime environment came online last summer. Even in terms of physical vehicle crossings, InWorldz has had ODE physics (same as other OpenSim grids) since before InWorldz was founded. However due to its ability to cause region crashes, it has been disabled for about a year (out of InWorldz’ 3 year history). If InWorldz simply turned physical objects back on, physical vehicle crossings would have been possible since the introduction of Phlox; the hard part, and the part Avination just completed, was the persistence of the scripts across the crossings, and that was fully functional and available grid-wide in InWorldz last summer.

However, since the Linden Lab proprietary implementation, another third party developer has provided an implementation of continuations in MONO, which has been available since MONO 2.6. This provides the context save/restore needed, and Avination has successfully applied that to the OpenSim runtime. That’s great news for MONO-based script engines in OpenSim.

Thinking Ahead

In the long run, I see moving away from MONO as the best (and perhaps the only) way to tame processor and memory use and provide complete control of the runtime environment. Phlox will provide that total control, which means more features. Things like much easier support for new languages, an LSL debugger that can be built-in to the viewers to allow single-stepping through LSL code and examination of variables at each stage, easier control over scripts CPU and memory usage, and many other secondary benefits, such as no need to try to limit script cost artificially and blame script authors for hurting sim performance.

But the bottom line here is that continuing a script in a new region, running on a completely different machine (IP address) is a Big Deal. Physical objects, a vehicles, not so much, but persisting those scripts, hell yes. It’s a major accomplishment, and now OpenSim has it too.

The article begins by saying “Proponents of pseudonymity scored a major victory today, when Google executive Vic Gundotra revealed at the Web 2.0 Summit that social networking service Google+ will begin supporting pseudonyms and other types of identity.”

However, it’s unclear what changes Gundotra’s comments referred to, and I believe the EFF is either jumping to conclusions, or intentionally trying to apply pressure to Google by pigeonholing the decision makers there into providing something that the EFF would consider a victory.

In contrast to the aggressive and crystal-clear headline, the EFF report ends with an almost complete flipflop — a much more watered down “hopeful” comment: “Though it is not yet clear what those features will look like, we are cautiously optimistic that Google+ will do the right thing to ensure that all of its users feel free to express themselves on the site.”

Mashable’s Reports

Furthermore, the EFF report is based on an article on Mashable, with a much calmer and accurate title “Google+ to Support Pseudonyms”.

Like the EFF article, it also ends with a cautionary note: “Gundotra didn’t go further into how Google+ will support pseudonyms.”

The question regarding pseudonyms was: “Eric (Schmidt, CEO), in the press, defended that as ‘We are an identity company, and therefore we want to have the right identity.’ Will you reconsider that?”

Gundotra replied: “We plan to support pseudonyms… in the future… we’re working on it. So it’s coming.” “It was largely an issue of development priorities. It’s complicated… to get this right.” “It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to support… uh uh… other forms of identity… it’s coming… it’s just that this is the way we wanted to roll out the service; this is the atmosphere we wanted to set” … “we’ll add these features.”

I Call BS

I call BS on the EFF article. First, this is old news. Gundotra is just reiterating what he said months ago.

Months ago, during the closed beta, when I had a Google+ account, I begged for them to add support for a separate per-circle identity — a kind of per-circle display name — so that Google could know my wallet name, but other users in different circles would know me by my online name, or possibly different online names. Then just as I was deleting my Google+ account, Gundotra claimed that Google would be adding support for this, but it was a significant development undertaking and it would take time. The impression I got from his comments was that it would take 6-12 months, and that in the meantime, the policy stands: Google+ identities would be required to be wallet names. Even once this work was complete, the Google account itself would represent a wallet name person, not an online identity. To understand why, again see that Mashable article.

But such a promise is not enough for me. After further thought, I decided that I used an online identity for a reason, and I did not want anyone, certainly not Google, especially not through my own direct application to them, to be able to connect my online identity with my offline (wallet) name.

When Google+ allows me to create a pseudonym-based Google profile, and use that as my Google+ account, then I will claim victory in the Nymwars. However, that would be a much smaller technical change than what Gundotra claims was required here. Until I see that, my belief is that they are doing what I originally suggested; they are adding support for one or more “pseudonyms to be supported” under an account based on a wallet name (only).

The Place For Optimism

From my perspective, the most positive comment was not the one regarding pseudonyms, but rather the question near the end, when a man from the audience asked about allowing Google Apps user accounts to have access to Google+. Gundotra claimed that the only reason this was not available was due to the “large body of technical work to enable Google+ to work with Google Apps”. In the long run, if Google wants to see continued growth of Google+, they will need to pull in the millions of existing accounts in use by other Google services. To limit Google+ use to new Google+ specific accounts is to sign the Google+ death warrant. So this begs the question: will they just do the technical work to let those millions of accounts in, with pseudonyms? Or will they also update the usage policies on those accounts to force a similar real-name policy? My personal bet is that they will eventually open Google+ to all Google accounts, including pseudonyms. Otherwise, we will all watch Google+ die a slow horrible death.

Other Notable Moments

There were some interesting quotes in that video interview, as well as some funny awkward moments. Here are some quotes from Vic Gundotra:

Questioned about Facebook and the challenge: “The incumbent has a huge advantage. And if you play the same game, that’s a hard game to win.”

Regarding a misguided interpretation of online identity: “It turns out that your friends, your mother, your cousin, they’re already on Google. They use it all the time. We’ve never given them a reason to express their identity and their relationships. And we’re going to do that.” Apparently he believes that your cousin isn’t using an online identity, but a wallet ID. And yet: “We do not believe in oversharing. We have a different philosophy.”

There were some funny moments too:

“I’ve been with Google for approaching five years.” Q: “Where were you before that?” A: “I used to work… with Steve… at Microsoft.” (laughter) “Wow. That was hard to get out.” (laughter) “Um…” (more laughter)

My favorite line however was this one: “There is a reason why every thought in your head does not come out of your mouth.” (laughter)